Enterprises are increasingly being asked to provide access to applications to employees, partners and service provides located outside the perimeter of the enterprise network. However, congested wide area network (WAN) links, heavily loaded servers, and low-bandwidth remote connections can impede access to and slow performance of remotely-accessed applications. These factors can substantially impact and reduce employee productivity and the return on investment in enterprise application software and infrastructure. Furthermore, these factors can also frustrate and alienate users from using remotely-accessed application. To obtain a satisfactory return on investment from these applications, enterprises need to ensure that all users, regardless of location, can use the applications quickly and effectively.
One approach for improving the performance of remotely-accessed applications is to install an appliance within the enterprise network that performs certain functions to accelerate application performance or provide controlled and managed access to the application. The appliance is typically installed as a gateway between a client and a server on a network and processing data passing between the two. However, even these appliances may experience performance or operational issues disrupting a user's experience in accessing the application. If the operation of the appliance or the network connection to the appliance is disrupted, the user will need to reconnect to the application. The user may have lost application information and productivity as well as experiencing frustration with the disruption
What is desired, then, are systems and methods that provide client-side high-availability solutions for accessing an application via a gateway.